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Seriously, you did a very good job of putting forth your point of view, and I wish I could simply agree with it. But I can't. Saying that when you ask for a particular version of Perl, you won't get new features, forces anyone implementing new features to have to put a check in their code to detect whether to go with the new or the old version of the feature. This would force the internals to get even more messy than they already are, because you're now maintaining a promise for perfect backwards compati

You make a good point. I think "good enough" backwards compatibility would still work fine though. My main concern is the addition of new pragmas that might be added to be loaded on default.

When I write use 5.010; I want to get given, when, say, and all the rest. But I don't expect autodie, strict, warnings and other such things to be turned on for me automatically. That could seriously break my code. I really like autodie, but I have some legacy code that does its own error handling. autodie does not allow for such code, unless you turn off autodie, it'll trump your error handling with its own. chromatic and others are arguing that these pragmas should come on by default in some future version of Perl. Which is an idea I also feel has much merit.

I'm merely suggesting that perhaps we can use the version number as a signal as to which of these pragmas should be loaded. I think these are much more likely to cause problems for the monoliths than new operators and similar features.

Jarich, thank you very much for expressing so clearly what it also my point. Yes, we may be "backward compatibility nazis" like some people are saying, but those people should know that for most companies out there, Perl is just like AWK, except more powerful. You expect it to always works the same way you expect the Sun to raise each morning.

Also, to illustrate what Jarich said, here is a ~250 lines module which is perfectly valid and working Perl code: